We Regret to Inform You Author Ariel Kaplan Shares the Inspiration Behind Her Dark College Application Comedy

Last winter, before the Pyeongchang Olympics, I was excited about figure skating.
Lots of people like skating—the dance! The athleticism! The costumes! And of course, there’s that horrible moment when a skater leaps into the air, and as a layperson you simply don’t know if the skater you are watching is going to land on one foot, as intended, on their rear, which would be unfortunate, or spread-eagled on the ice, which would be disastrous. It’s got something for everyone. Champions, underdogs, sequins.
Before Pyeongchang, though, we got to enjoy the U.S. Nationals, and if you, like me, are interested in skating, you’ll probably remember that the star of that particular competition was Nathan Chen, the seventeen-year-old Quad King, the great, shining hope of U.S. men’s skating. At that competition, everything he did was brilliant. The fact that he was sick at the time hardly seemed to faze him.
During the competition, one of the reporters remarked that in addition to getting ready for the Olympics, he’d also just finished applying to colleges, and she asked him which was more stressful—college applications, or the Olympic trials. College applications, he assured her, were much worse. She laughed. He laughed—a little. Sitting on my couch, I did not laugh, because I suspect he wasn’t exactly kidding.
If applying to college has become more stressful than trying out for the Olympics—for a kid who is a world-class athlete who will have no trouble getting into any number of great schools—things might be getting a touch out of hand. Around the same time, another high school student—Michael Brown, of Texas—was making the newspaper rounds, not for his sports prowess, but for getting admitted to twenty different colleges, including four Ivies and Stanford.
I honestly can’t imagine how long it would take to fill out twenty college applications, or how much stress that would involve. Nobody with a 4.68 GPA and 1560 SATs should have to do that to make sure he got into (and could afford) a good school. It’s ridiculous.
Back when I applied to colleges, I was also stressed, but it was nothing like what today’s kids are dealing with. Mostly I remember being very worried about my handwriting, which was then and remains today very, very bad. Forms in those days were all on paper and had to be filled out by hand or on a typewriter, an item that was hard to find even back then. I imagined some person in a college admissions office slicing open my packet with a dagger-sharp letter opener, taking one look at my chicken scratch (“Is it Kaplan or Raplan? I can’t even tell.”) and sliding the whole mess into the “no” pile. This worried me greatly, among the regular concerns about SAT scores, extracurriculars, and that one B+ in Spanish sophomore year that I am still mad about.
But like most things, inflation has taken its toll on the college admissions process. Kids are applying to more colleges than ever—some three million applications are sent out every year, to the tune of two hundred million dollars’ worth of fees. The tuition costs, of course, have gone from “too high” to “really, don’t even count the zeros.” And, of course, there is the intangible quantity of stress. The stress of having to constantly distinguish oneself from one’s peers. To get the highest test scores. To take the most AP classes. To have the most impressive list of extracurriculars.
And then there’s the capriciousness of the process. When kids read about C students getting into Harvard after their fathers give massive donations, or because they are fourth-generation legacies, or because they come with a celebrity name attached, how are they to feel? How can they compete with that? Most of them can’t.
How do you acknowledge that the stress these kids are under has become too much? Applying to college should not be more stressful than trying out for the Olympics, and top students shouldn’t have to apply to twenty (really, it boggles the mind) schools.
And what happens to kids who go through all that stress, and at the end, don’t get in?
We don’t talk much about those kids—the ones who end up metaphorically spread-eagled on the ice—who are left to ask: What now? And even more than that: Who am I now?
Perhaps this, more than anything else, is the question teenagers should have the time and mental space to ask themselves.
We Regret to Inform You is on shelves today.